Showing posts with label greens. Show all posts
Showing posts with label greens. Show all posts

31 March 2013

Brazil's New Political Party: Green With A Shade Of Pirate

Techdirt has been following the rapid rise and current problems of the various Pirate Parties in Europe for some time. Both their success and difficulties flow in part from the fact that they do not fit neatly into the traditional political categories. This makes them attractive to those who are disenchanted with established parties, but also makes it hard for Pirate Parties to devise a coherent political program that they can seek to implement, for example through alliances with others. 

On Techdirt.

03 December 2011

The Pirate Party Effect: German Greens Scramble To Draw Up Digital Policies To Hold On To Voters

The founding of the Pirate Party in Sweden in 2006 was regarded by many as a joke. After all, the argument went, who would want to be associated with "pirates" or vote for such a narrow platform? This overlooked the fact that the traditional political parties had consistently ignored the concerns of voters who understood that the Internet raised important questions about areas such as copyright and privacy. By focusing on precisely those issues, the Pirate Party gave disaffected voters the opportunity to express their dissatisfaction with the old political parties and their outdated policies. 

On Techdirt.

06 June 2011

The Great Prize: Innovating Without Monopolies

Last week I was in Brussels, talking at the European Parliament - not, I hasten to add, talking to the Parliament. This was a more intimate gathering in one of the smaller (but still quite large) conference halls, discussing a rather interesting matter:

On Open Enterprise blog.

23 January 2008

From Fair Dealing to Fair Sharing

What's interesting about the site "I Wouldn't Steal" is not so much the message - that downloading files is not the same as stealing handbags - but that a political party, albeit the Greens, has created it, along with a neat little YouTube video to get the message across. In other words, it marks a move from a purely passive resistance to the media conglomerates' continuing efforts to re-write the law to suit themselves, to a more militant one that strives to get alternative viewpoints across.

I think this is important, because at the moment the general public is very confused about copyright (and intellectual monopolies in general). That suits the content companies, and shows that the way forward is by educating people so that they can understand what the deeper issues are.

18 July 2007

Green Government, Open Government

Talking of open government:

To Chance in particular, and the Greens in general, the promoting of FOSS is ultimately the promotion of the party's own values. Simply encouraging the use of FOSS in public institutions, he suggests, would improve government, "both because it would be more focused on a just, equitable, and sustainable future and because it would force government to be more open, transparent, and participatory. We suffer from an incredibly centralized, opaque, and disempowering government in England and Wales. We desperately need the participatory ethic of free software to transform government."

02 March 2007

Waiting for the Green Biotech Hackers

An interesting meditation on green biotech hacking, and why we're not quite there yet:

The bigger problem, though, is the turnaround time. No engineer or hacker wants to wait four weeks to see if a program works. Hit compile, wait for four weeks, no "Hello World." Start trying to debug the bug, with no debugging tools. No thanks. (I've actually had discussions with geneticists/molecular biologists who think even waiting a few days for a synthesis job isn't a big deal. But what can you say -- biology just hasn't been a hacker culture. And we are the poorer for it.)

I arrived here from the fine Open the Future blog, which had this very insightful comment in the same context:

Green biotech hacking is still in the punch-card era, and ... computer hacker culture really didn't take off until you got past punch-cards into time-sharing, where the cost in time and money was low enough that mistakes were something to learn from, not dread.

I think the latter phrase - "mistakes are something to learn from, not dread" - could well stand as an armourial motto for the entire open movement.